A hackathon will be held later this year to improve digitization of biological collections. The event is organized by iDigBio and Zooniverse’s Notes from Nature Project. The goal of the hackathon is to build interoperability among projects thus further enabling public participation in biocollections digitization in useful and exciting ways.

The event will occur from 3-5 December 2014 in Gainesville, Florida. Up to $1,500 for support of travel, lodging, and meals is available for each participant.

Two or more development tracks will be identified by hackathon participants during one or more remote meetings prior to the hackathon. These tracks could involve (1) innovative cross-platform ways to deploy and manage public participation projects, (2) services for data analysis and visualization to engage the public or inform project management, (3) novel ways to advertise and grow public participation projects, or (4) ingestion of crowdsourced data into biodiversity collection data management systems.

Applications are currently being accepted for five to seven open participants. Please send (1) your CV/resume, (2) a short description (less than 250 words) of your relevant expertise (citing example products where appropriate), (3) a short description of the functionality that you’d like to develop in this domain, and (4) the days that you can attend to Austin Mast (amast@bio.fsu.edu) by 1 September. Qualified graduate students and postdoctoral scholars are encouraged to apply.